How Wolfram Alpha Compares to Google, Wikipedia

In just a few days' time, college students and amateur researchers will gain a new resource: Wolfram Alpha, which sits somewhere between Google and Wikipedia as a Web almanac or research tool. We asked Wolfram co-founder to explain Alpha's nuances, and took it for a test drive.

Contents

In just a few days' time, college students and amateur researchers will gain a new resource: Wolfram Alpha, which sits somewhere between Google and Wikipedia as a research tool.

Technically, it straddles the two as well: while Google's automated search algorithms crawl tens of millions of Web sites aggregating data, Wikipedia is a human-driven effort, crowdsourced information that is vetted and edited by others.

Wolfram Alpha, meanwhile, uses a small army of dedicated experts to add, evaluate, judge, and parse data. In fact, it wouldn't surprise Wolfram co-founder Theodore Gray if Google has learned some lessons from the way Wolfram treats data; Google co-founder Sergey Brin was a summer intern many years ago, Gray said in an interview.

"It should give them perspective on whether they should pay attention to us or not," Gray said of Google.

What is Wolfram Alpha? Dubbing it the world's best online almanac is a good start. But it's also a work in progress, as evidenced by its complete failure to parse some common technical terms, such as "MP3".

PCMag.com was granted early access to the Wolfram Alpha Web site, which officially goes live on May 15, a few days earlier than expected. The site will be powered by an array of Dell hardware, including a Top 50 supercomputer; Gray said, however, that Wolfram has no idea whether the hardware will be sufficient, possibly forcing Wolfram into what Gray called several backup plans to throttle traffic.

Wolfram Alpha does three things well: the site offers up a surprising amount of data, and organizes it superbly in charts and graphs. Wolfram's legacy, a mathematics program called Mathematica, also means the site shines in parsing mathematic queries; a "show steps" function could make calculus homework child's play. But the site also makes it clear, if one wishes to peruse the sources footnoted for the data, that Wolfram makes definite judgments about what types of data are accurate and relevant, and why.

"I like to think of it as a library," Gray said. "Google's job is to index everything that's already in there. But it's not Google's job to tell you that a given source is reliable or not."

But how does Wolfram make that distinction? By a combination of human oversight on top of algorithmic searching, Gray said.

"The human effort and the algorithmic effort working together is sort of a general theme of the work on Alpha," Gray said. "Fully automated just doesn't work. But doing everything by hand is impractical. It's a very finely tuned hybrid system, where human beings are just doing the amount that's necessary."

Gray admitted that Wikipedia does have one advantage: detailed textual descriptions, which computers can't synthesize at the current time. But, he added, the site still doesn't quite live up to the ideal of a democratized source of communal information.

"I don't like to disparage Wikipedia, as it's an incredibly useful research tool  people use it every day, journalists use it every day  but you do have to watch out, as it's a closely guarded secret" as to who contributes, Gray said. "It's correspondingly difficult, without independent research, to find out: was this something somebody snuck in as a prank?"

At Wolfram, Gray said, "we have a 23-year record in terms of mathematical knowledge and content algorithms  there's a place you can complain to." Next: How It Works